It’s still being used by Valve for inhouse development, but I remember back when HL2 was release it was as big as Unreal. What happened?
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I think the main thing is that Valve never really wanted to be in the engine licensing business.
There’s a saying that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time you budget for, and then the final 10% takes another 90% of the budgeted time. If you’re just using your own software, you can really economise on that last 10% by only finishing up stuff you really need.
If you’re making a business if selling your software to third parties, you really need to finish up that last 10% of polish, and invest in all sorts of technical developer support and such, and it seems like Valve just wasn’t interested in growing out that capability.
The licensing deals they did do seemed to be more like: here is the source code, you’re on your own from this point.
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